How BI is Lowering Healthcare Costs

Putting business intelligence in the form of cost accounting data directly into the hands of physicians can start rich dialogues within or between service lines to make healthcare more predictable, more consistent, and less expensive.

John Kenagy, PhD,
CIO of Legacy Health

In this year of Meaningful Use Stage 2 and ICD-10 deadlines, CIOs are consumed by the effort of meeting the high bars set by government to achieve compliance with these mandates. Wouldn't it be great if technology could also control escalating healthcare costs?

It might happen sooner than anyone thinks.

John Kenagy, PhD, CIO of Legacy Health, may just be the catalyst to making that happen, not only at his own five-hospital system in Portland, Oregon, but far beyond those walls.

A year ago at HIMSS, Kenagy conducted a kind of shuttle diplomacy between Epic and Strata Decision, two vendors with large installed bases. Epic's reputation precedes it, and its own new business intelligence software, Cogito, is being adopted widely. Strata Decision is less well known, but its financial management and cost accounting software is installed in one of five hospitals in the U.S., more than 170 healthcare systems overall.

Kenagy's big audacious goal: to get a unified view on healthcare costs down to the physician level, while overlaying clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction data. Kenagy is a man on a mission, and as a result of his legwork at last year's HIMSS, he recently convened a summit at Legacy where all the stakeholders, including clinical leaders and finance chiefs, all worked in unison on Legacy's big goal.

Frank Poggio (2/11/2014 at 9:04 PM)
Interesting piece. As a former CFO I always thought we would get to this and beyond. It's been decades in the making, and not too soon. Another firm that offers some nice tools to accomplish similar results is HCI based in Illinois. Info at http://hcillc.com